Does SEO seem like a technical detail to you? Maybe something for your IT department to worry about? Well guess what? (Suspense-filled pause.) It’s not.
Good SEO is critical for your blog or website to appear appropriately in search results from Google, Yahoo, Bing, and others. It helps customers find you, whether they’re potential buyers, readers, donors, volunteers, clients, press, or anyone else. Even current customers use search engines often, because it seems faster. Make sure it is!
If you do have an IT department, they likely have limited knowledge of marketing, your audience, or both. You need to work together to ensure your copy and behind-the-scenes details include the right words and code to help people find you easily.
Although I’m not an expert, I helped a small business with some basic SEO recently. Here are some resources I used:
- Google support: Webmaster Guidelines: Best practices to help Google find, crawl, and index your site
- SEO Consultants: Tutorial and pictorial – optimizing PDFs for search
Be aware the algorithms used by the search engines have evolved, and will continue to evolve. For example, meta data keywords aren’t relevant in the way they once were. It’s also important to remember search engines aren’t looking at your whole site, but individual pages within it. Be sure to search for yourself and your organization every once in a while, in as many ways you can think of.
Now, get to it!
